Another giveaway is that their photos are often also extremely similar (because they reuse the manufacturer's reference design, or rebrand their original cards). But if you do have hardware or firmware RAID/caching in use however, STOP RIGHT HERE and check what's safest for your data before you disconnect drives or unplug controller cards.

Read the safety instructions, read the rest to get an idea of it, then follow their release notes and use their flasher and update the cards that way. exe, backup the existing SBR data (although you probably won't ever need it) and then erase the card and all NVRAM data, including writing empty SBR data to the card.

HBAs and network cards are both a) very close to the metal and b) complicated, especially when you start doing server stuff, so tried and tested drivers and the like are highly beneficial especially when the underlying tech you're using hasn't changed very much.

in 8x slot" in motherboard specs, which means 4 lanes are provided, but the slot can accommodate cards designed for 8 lanes (at reduced 4 lane speed). This is slightly more involved on motherboards with integrated LSI controllers (like my supermicro X10SL7-F), but just as easy in the end. NOTE: You can also check if the sas2flash utility detects your card(s) properly with the listall command before you start the whole process. The short answer is that usually it shouldn't be any worry, and you cannot "brick" these cards (render them unusable), but there are precautions you can take if concerned - and there are a few very definite warning signs to watch out for.

It seems you don't need the SAS ID or anything else in firmware to be able to reflash new firmware or add a replacement SAS ID to the erased card after reboot. Google is sure to have information to help you as well, and if not, ask on this or other relevant forums. org permalink) - a nice guide, worth mentioning because the author has put a lot of work into screenshots, including EFI, and also collected a load of different versions of flashers, firmware and other useful files - not just LSI but Dell and others too. If you have one of these boards, then come back to this guide once you've worked out how to get sas2flash to run - that's too specific to each motherboard to cover here. I'd be surprised if that were true - it's relatively rare to see hardware support removed from the linux kernel, especially for comparatively modern hardware.